The following was a narrative from one of our former child soldier scholarship students who has finished his vocational training and has graduated. He is now participating in a CSRF/MBB sponsored PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) counseling program. These are his thoughts:
I had no interest for this whole thing when it all started. I thought the people came here to just know about us and go make money out of us. But you see me sitting here so, it is not that something is wrong or that I am worrying, it is because I have just started getting the picture that the people want for us to be able to control our own minds, know how to talk with others and I think make us civilized people. Every time I sit in front of the woman [his clinician], she asks me all sorts of questions like how I used to feel whenever I shot a gun or shot somebody and the person died or was crying from pains, or what do I tell my girlfriend to make her happy when she feels that I have offended her and how do I feel later seeing that I have made her happy through my own sense? I tell the woman that I can tell my girl that I'm very sorry and that I promise not to offend her any more. Right there after I have answered her question, Prof., then something can just click to my mind, then I begin to see understand that she's drawing my attention to identify my ability to reconcile my own bad behavior. The woman has not actually asked me about what I intend to do to people who I one way or the other offended or hurt during the war but my imagination is making me to kind of see the relationship between the feelings of those people who we killed people from in Liberia and that of my offense to my girl. So the fact is that if I am able to identify my potential in dealing with specific cases like the one I just explained to you, then I have the sense that my friends are doing likewise. But if I had my own will, Prof., I would tell our sponsors to carry this kind of training to Liberia. It is too important to our lives. I think all of us Liberian youth need the PST and I believe everybody here feels that way too. We can be talking about it when we sit in our caucus. Don't mind the guys who can come here and be shouting, they can plan to come and do so , it can't really come from their hearts, they just want to draw attention. All of us are enjoying the training. I won't lie to you Prof.
::And this is why we do this::
About Me
- Penelope Nelson
- I have worked as a researcher at the Ford Institute for Human Security for the past two years. I started out researching the Liberian civil war (1999-2003) and Liberian child soldiers. I ended up traveling to a Liberian refugee camp located just outside of Accra, Ghana to work with a group of former child soldiers in the summer of 2007. Working with this group of people was amazing. I learned so much that I hadn't been able to learn simply by researching or sitting at my desk reading. Their experiences are real. Their wounds and trauma is real. Programs to help them are almost nonexistent. Yet, this relatively small group of child soldiers is key to the fate and future of Liberia. This is what I do. Over the course of the last year, I have networked with different groups and individuals in order to help address the needs of former child soldiers as they seek to rejoin society. In December of 2007, I founded a non-profit organization called the Child Soldier Reintegration Fund (CSRF). My non-profit works together with another non-profit called Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB) to help child soldiers bridge the gap between their post-war existence and peaceful reintegration.
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